How to Win at B2B Social Media: 5 Steps for Success

Mar 15

Social media is an easy marketing effort for B2B brands to underestimate and overlook. While most brands know they need social media added to their marketing mix, they don’t always understand how useful it can be with the right strategy. Nor do they properly estimate the commitment it takes. They periodically post with no consistency, planning or proper reporting -- and wonder why they aren’t seeing results.

The truth about B2B social media is that it can be effective to bolster your brand, build trust and connect with your customers, if used in the right ways.

When strategically aligned with business goals and objectives, B2B social media can produce real, measurable results. Let’s look at the steps to make it happen.

5 Steps to Help You Win at B2B Social Media

Follow these steps to set your B2B brand up for success on social media.

1. Research your competitors.

Social media success looks different for every brand and for every industry. To understand how your organization will find success, you need to set realistic expectations for what is possible. That process starts by looking at how your competitors are engaging the market.

Browse competitor profiles and use tools to research your competition to get an idea of what positive results look like in your industry. Look at the following metrics for brands similar to you.

Channels and platforms they use
Number of followers
Cadence of publishing
Type of content published
Engagement on posts
Type of content that performs best
Popular hashtags
Social advertising or content boosts

2. Set your objectives and goals.

It will be difficult to see success in B2B social media if you don’t define what success looks like. You need to have clear objectives and goals to be able to know if you met them.

Consider what is possible with B2B social media, and decide which one to three objectives align with your overall brand goals. The goals you identify will help you lay out a strategy to reach them.

Some B2B social media goals to consider include:

Brand Awareness: Introduce your brand to new audiences and/or stay top-of-mind with existing audiences.
Credibility: Build trust by showing up when potential customers search for you or want to learn more about you.
Content Distribution: Use social media to promote content that you publish on your site or other platforms.
Drive Traffic: Increase website traffic by sharing content that leads audiences back to your site.
Lead Generation: Generate new leads and collect email addresses or phone numbers from your target audience.
Increase Sales: Drive new purchases.
Build a Community: Create a community where audiences can go to interact with your brand as well as other like-minded people and ideas.
Customer Service: Help customers who need service related to your products or services.

3. Create a content calendar.

When you know what you want to accomplish through B2B social media, it will be easier to know what type of publishing strategy will help you get there. Look at your objectives, and use them to guide you to create a content calendar.

Choose the right platforms. Being on social media doesn’t mean your brand needs to be on every social media platform. Instead, focus your strategy around the platforms where your ideal audience is most likely to spend time. Prioritize your platform if engaging on many.

Choose a publishing schedule. Set a schedule for how often you would like to publish and when to publish. Look to your competitor research to see how much you should post to remain competitive with similar brands. The frequency of social posts is accepted differently among platforms. For instance, on Twitter, you can post multiple times a day and it wouldn’t be a bother, but LinkedIn and Facebook audiences prefer a much less frequency, more like an average of 3 times a week.

Define the type of content to share. Develop themes for the type of content you will publish. Consider the different types of content you can share, and match them with the goals that you would like to achieve. Have intent with the ratio of your content types. We typically like to see a 70/30% ratio with helpful/resourceful content to promotional/sales content.

Owned Content: Content published on your site or other social platforms
Promotions: Sales pitches and discounts for products and services
User-Generated Content: Reposted content from customers who have shared or posted to your site
Behind-the-Scenes Content: Inside looks at your operations
Success Stories: Case studies and the results of client success
Content from Other Sources: Content published by other credible 3rd party sources
Native Content: Content, such as Twitter treads and Facebook live videos, that don’t prompt users to click away to another site

4. Layout a social media engagement plan.

A strong B2B social media plan isn’t a one-way conversation. It leverages posting content as well as engaging with the people who see and consume your content or that you’d like to consume your content. Engaging in your customer’s social content, commenting on posts that fit your brand, and following others in your community take time and intention, so don’t overestimate this very crucial step.

As you layout your social media plan, outline details for how you will manage communication with your community and who is responsible for managing those interactions.

How often will someone check on comments and messages?
Who will respond to comments and messages?
How quickly should messages and comments be addressed?
Who will moderate community content?
How should members of your team engage with social media content?

5. Review results, and iterate based on what you learn.

To have a successful social media strategy, you can’t just lay out a plan and assume that it will work. The only way to truly understand the impact of your work is to look at the data.

Set a time to regularly review your results. Track your data monthly or weekly. Review what is working and what isn’t, and look for ways to optimize your strategy to produce better results.

Look at metrics that are tied specifically to social media such as:

Number of new followers
Top post content types
Number of shares, likes, and clicks
Reach (how many people see your posts)
Hashtags with the largest reach

Also, consider metrics that are tied to your specific social media goals such as:

Social media referral traffic to your website
Number of new leads
Sales and revenue changes
Message response time
Number of brand mentions

B2B social media can work for a variety of purposes. What is important is if it’s working for what you need. Keep your objectives in mind as you review your data. If sales were your primary goal, don’t worry if your follower count didn’t grow by much if you reached your 25% increase in sales goal with strategic social advertising placements.

If your social media strategy is not reaching your specific goals, it might be time to pivot your planning and start back at step one.

Build a Better B2B Social Media Strategy

B2B social media can create real results for your brand -- but only if you have a strategy behind your posts and interactions, and you have commitment to the time investment to be thoughtful and consistent.

If your brand is haphazardly posting to social media without a clear plan for how it will work for your business, stop wasting your time, and let’s talk.

SpotOn Digital can outline a strategic B2B social media plan that will help you reach your brand goals and objectives. Contact SpotOn today to learn more about our social planning and management services.

B2B

Amanda Sanz